Abstract
The foetal origins hypothesis postulates that shocks while in utero can have long-term detrimental effects on the health and human capital formation of children. Using data from the Young Lives project for Vietnam, we examine the effects of exposure to historically abnormal rainfall among children in utero on the cognitive development of the same children from 5 to 15 years of age. Based on data on month and place of birth, we show that positive rainfall shocks are associated with better cognitive development in children up to 8 years of age. The effect is more pronounced when positive shocks occur in the early stage of gestation. However, such positive effects are not sustained: the impacts of positive rainfall shocks on cognition are completely absent at 10 and 15 years of age. We contribute to the literature by examining the importance of the timing and persistence of weather shocks during pregnancy on cognitive development by tracking the same children from in utero to school age.
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Source: the author’s own calculation based on the Young Lives data
Source: the author’s own calculation based on the Young Lives data
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Notes
In Vietnam, formal schooling starts at age 6.
See http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/html_pages/download.html#ghcn_T_P_clim3. This dataset has been widely used in the economics literature to measure climatic shocks and climate change (e.g. Burke et al., 2015; Dell et al., 2012; Rocha & Soares, 2015; Sarsons, 2015).
Using multiple (young and old) cohorts would, indeed, be desirable in this case. However, the problem with the older cohort is that the birthplace is unknown since they were already 8 years old when the first round of the YL survey was implemented. A lack of information about the birthplace made it impossible to construct the exposure to rainfall shocks in utero for the older cohort.
For example, if a child was born in September in 2001, the historical mean refers to the September rainfall average for year 1970–2000.
In the literature on weather shocks, Ogasawara and Yumitori (2019) also used this approach to compute clustered standard errors.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Tushar Bharati and Rashesh Shrestha for the insightful comments and the excellent suggestion of the literature. We are grateful to Elizabeth Fussell (the editor), and four anonymous referees for greatly improving this work from the initially submitted version. We are also grateful to Fukunari Kimura, Ian Coxhead, and workshop participants for their encouragement and sharing useful comments with us.
Funding
This research was supported by the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA).
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Yamashita, N., Trinh, TA. Effects of prenatal exposure to abnormal rainfall on cognitive development in Vietnam. Popul Environ 43, 346–366 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-021-00394-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-021-00394-6